The Truth About Junior Seau's Struggle

Rocky V is the Rocky film no one watches, mostly because it's terrible, but also because its plot revolves around how the famous boxer is now crippled by the brain injuries he's suffered throughout his career. No one wants to watch a hero struggle through that. We want the fight. We want the blows to the body and to the head, but we don't want to have to deal with the traumatic aftermath of our entertainment.

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Well Junior Seau, the 20-year NFL veteran linebacker who killed himself last May, is that aftermath, after receiving an official post-mortem diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in a report released Thursday by the National Institutes of Health. So, too, is former Bears defensive back Dave Duerson, who took his own life with a gunshot wound to the chest to spare his brain for study. And so is Falcons safety Ray Easterling, who committed suicide following bouts with dementia, depression, and insomnia after only eight NFL seasons.

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All three suffered from CTE, the result of the presence of a protein called "tau" that effectively strangles brains cells. All in, Boston University's center for the study of the disease counts 34 pros and nine college kids who have been diagnosed after their football careers were over. There's likely countless more who've yet to feel the onset of CTE, or yet to come forward.

But it's still hard to imagine the end of the existence of football, as Malcolm Gladwell estimated might happen in a New Yorker article on this topic back in 2009, because we don't think about the down-the-road effects of a blindside quarterback sack. We just jump out of our chairs and shout "OOOHHH!" and that's really all that's expected of us as fans.

But the NFL, a multi-billion dollar industry profiting from twenty-somethings crashing into each other at break-neck speeds, needs to do more. They've ignored the outcries of families and refused to acknowledge the links between their sport and the ugly aftermath the players face. That was fine before this became a problem with a body count. Now it's simply unacceptable.

Junior Seau gave the bulk of his life to the sport of football, and it paid him back in wealth and fame, but also in his own demise. When asked if the NFL response to traumatic brain injuries was too slow, Seau's wife, Gina, had a blunt answer for ABC News: "Too slow for us, yeah."